What Happens When Everyone Chooses Their Own Media Channels?
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What Happens When Everyone Chooses Their Own Media Channels?
Theral Timpson figured it out early and created a media channel after reading a book. Then he built a business on it.
The book is Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone.
And his business is a podcast, Mendelspod, where he connects people and ideas in the life sciences for an audience of 50,000 subscribers.
In this interview, I asked Theral about the evolution of his podcast, the use of media in the life sciences and where he sees it going in the future.
We discuss:
What it’s like to have a front row seat to the Century of Biology.
How an influx of people from tech are changing the models for life science businesses
The value of an audience first strategy
Revolutions in both life science and media
What it means for marketers when every person can choose their own channels
The benefits of podcasting for marketers
Our Sponsor: ACP-LS
An episode of Gene and Tonic.
This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
Chris: My guest today is the host and producer of mendelspod.com which is a blog and podcast devoted to advancing the life science industry by connecting people and ideas. Theral Timpson, welcome to Life Science Marketing Radio.
Theral: Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me on.
Chris: It’s my pleasure. I think this is going to be fun. So the reason I invited you on the show is I’m interested in life science media in general and the idea of companies using media like a podcast to build their audience. And I think your background story is interesting as a starting place, it would be valuable for our audience to hear. So you told me previously your first choice was music so I’m curious how you made the jump to life science.
Theral: Right. Actually it happened, we all have these stories where it just kind of comes out of the blue. But I was in college and I was studying music and also English literature and I had to work in college. And so I was the office manager for, actually, a construction company and this is back in Utah. I had no connections in life science at this point and I decided to do a study abroad program one summer which lost me my job. So when I got back my brother-in-law said, “Hey, I’m doing a startup and maybe you can come work with us and we’re making pipette tips.” And I said, “Pipette what?” Now I knew he had had a company making tips before this and had sold it and was a multi-millionaire so that was good enough for me and I said, “Hey, I’m on board.” So I went in there and they had one injection molding machine and they were making pipette tips and I said, “Why does it have a hole in the bottom?” Because I thought this was the tip for a syringe.
Chris: Yeah.
Theral: And he says, “No, it’s for transferring liquids.” So he got out a pipetter, put on the tips and start transferring liquid and I’m like, “Okay. Why would you do that?” So I really started with not much knowledge and I wasn’t taking biology or genetics or even chemistry in college. I was going from queer theory literary studies and playing the clarinet over to work marketing these pipette tips. But anyway, I sold their first tips, we were first trying to sell to laboratories and that was kind of tough to break in there with just the pipette tip. And so I set about setting up a distribution network which ended up being a worldwide kind of project and I ended up going into laboratories and genetics facilities across the world. I was at the rice genome center outside Tokyo when they had just bought like 20 ABI 3700s, the first sequencers you know. And so I was watching all this happen and of course talking to the customers. I basically learned about the industry.
Chris: Wow. Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s a fascinating story like the first thing you saw of our industry was literally the tip.
Theral: Pretty basic, huh?
Chris: It’s amazing. Those things fascinating to me just for other reasons like the gazzilions of those that have to be produced and get thrown away and whatever.
Theral: The billions.
Chris: Yeah.
Theral: Yeah. So the guy who is my brother-in-law had invented the tip for sequencing back when you would put the tip between… when you would do gels.
Chris: Right, I’ve done that.
Theral: And you put the tip between plates, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Theral: And so he created, he was able to mold this kind of flat like duck-bill tip at the end called the gel sequencing tip I think, and that’s really when his company took off. And so he did pretty well with that because there’s just billions of them. Then, of course, automated sequencing came out and they weren’t that much in demand.
Chris: Right. Then tell me how you get started with mendelspod.com. What got you thinking about a podcast?
Theral: Right. So I was doing life science marketing consulting like you’re doing and had various clients and I like that. I like to jump from moving from one company. I was with that one company from college for 13 years and then I got pulled in to some other companies and I thought I should just do this freelance as a consultant then I can go here and go there. And so I got pulled in to a DNA synthesis company and ended up actually doing some startups as well on the side. And I really like the jump to having multiple projects. I wasn’t limited by this one line of pipette tips or lab consumables. I mean it expanded a bit but I guess my mind, I needed a little bit more stimulation and I loved the fact that I could work with one company for a week and then they would set the action plan into progress and I could go off to another company and work with them.
Chris: Right.
Theral: So then that’s what I was doing and I hired a life kind of career coach I guess, a career coach who was also a friend of mine. She referred me to a book and so I was like ten pages into this book and the author was talking about podcasting and I thought, “That’s it. I should do a podcast.” And it just made total sense. And at the time I knew there was a bio-IT world podcast but I felt like it was pretty commercially focused, you know with advertising. And then I had heard the nature podcast so I’d heard a couple of podcast like Nature Magazine. But they were just summarizing stories in nature, right?
Chris: Yep.
Theral: And I thought what if I would just do stories all over the industry and really feature people. And one of my favorite news program over the years has been Charlie Rose. You know Charlie Rose?
Chris: Oh yeah.
Theral: Yeah, so that was many hours late at night watching him talk to people and just the art of conversation, and just letting it go where it went. And so that was really a model for me starting out, it was Charlie Rose. But I told my career coach, I said, “Hey, what do you think about a podcast?” She says, “I think there’s something to that.” And she had actually worked in a TV studio the previous four years, a community television studio. She was quite fascinated by media and she’s an avid consumer of media. I mean she reads everything that comes out all the time. She’s one of those people that in the car she’ll grab any kind of brochure or any product, label, or anything and read it. And so she’s actually my business partner now and I have to give a lot of credit to her. She really came up with the whole thing with me. It was a couple of weeks over Christmas holiday actually so it’s coming up on five years. And we tell people we just had a little bit too much wine.
Chris: So do you remember the book that you are reading?
Theral: Yeah, the book was Six Pixels of Separation.
Chris: Okay. I think I heard of that but I have not read it.
Theral: So a bit of a twist on the movie, the Six Degrees.
Chris: Yep.
Theral: And written by Mitch Joel, a Canadian marketing guru. He has lots of good ideas. I admit actually I have not finished the book. I do this with books. Once I get to like that idea that sends me going then I just have to pursue the idea and sometimes I don’t even make it back to the books.
Chris: Okay. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes when this comes out so people can, if they’re interested, they can find it.
Theral: Good, yeah. I was so proud after we’ve been going for like a year. I took it on Twitter or LinkedIn or somewhere and say, “Hey, Mitch Joel, thanks for the book. We’ve actually created a business from reading your book.”
Chris: Nice. Well, that’s what we’re talking about today. So for those who haven’t heard it, can you describe, I mean I mentioned Mendelspod at the beginning but I’d love to hear how you describe what it’s really about.
Theral: Right. So when I invite someone on the show I usually keep it simple. I say it’s a podcast where I’m interviewing thought leaders around the industry. So our vision is to connect people and ideas in life sciences in an interesting way, in a thought provoking, deeper conversation. A little bit longer period of time than you get with an article or the quick sound bites that we become so used to.
Chris: Right. I mean I share the love of podcasting but describe for me what that’s like. What do you get out of it?
Theral: What do I personally get out of it?
Chris: Yes.
Theral: Okay. So if going from one company to several companies I was consulting for as a marketer was a nice jump for me going into the media was every bit as nice a jump because you see, I can interview someone today and then I’ll spend a couple of days researching, getting into that interview. I really just absorb everything. I mean I just really imagine myself in that person’s life and try to think like them and try to have their vision. I’ll do the interview and next week I’m on to something else. So it’s fantastic for someone who likes stimulation like I do. But then also the chance to connect the different themes that are going on, right? From new ways of sharing data, open science trends to regulation topics, we’ve become known as a sort of expert source for what’s going on with the FDA and genetic testing. And I find it deeply satisfying to sort of connect these threads at a high level, you know the highest level possible. And we always try, I think we’re pretty much science… We try to be on the edge of science at Mendelspod. So most life science media it will be about the business, right? You got funded series A, series B stock reports, mergers, how much they’re selling this product for. And then there’s the ones that are just devoted to science, right? Nature Magazine, Science Magazine, and that’s peer reviewed, that’s been a long tradition and that’s the really high level stuff. So we’ll patch on these various different things but I think we try to kind of stay close to the science as it comes out but then always try to connect it to usually health care or it could be the environment.
Chris: Right, that’s where most of it’s… in life science, that’s where it’s going, right?
Theral: Right. And from that perspective, I mean what could be more satisfying than seeing science comes fresh off the press or down the bench, and then seeing that applied in real life applications. We all know people who suffer from various maladies or maybe we have and to see it make a difference in people’s lives. I mean it’s just an amazing opportunity. We feel like we have a front row seat to the Century of Biology.
Chris: Exactly. And so you say how fascinating it is to you and how lucky you are to hear this and I’m thinking in terms of building an audience of scientists or other people in the industry, how compelling that type of content is to that group of people. So my next question is, do you target a specific audience? Do you have a certain group in mind or you’re just going out there looking for stories and everyone’s welcome? I guess I’m trying to understand your strategy.
Theral: Yeah. Well, I think the way media has evolved these days, you would be doing yourself a disservice not to just make it available, right?
Chris: Right.
Theral: So all of our shows are freely available and we put it on social media and try to get it out to as big of audiences as we can. But at the same time I have to say that organic audience that’s built up has definitely been industry insiders, right?
Chris: Yeah. I mean your content has to address a certain group for sustained attention I think, right?
Theral: I guess so, yeah. Right, the loyal audience that comes back again and again because they want to see how it’s developing, what’s new developments. So I’ve been told that people like us because we’re a bit future-oriented, edgy, looking toward the future. When I do the podcast a lot of times I think about myself when I was doing a couple of startups. I actually got involved in a genetic testing company back in 2006 or so and that was the year that 23 and Me started.
Chris: Yeah.
Theral: And it was so exciting. I gave so much of my life to that but it was really difficult and it was really frustrating. It didn’t work out for us. And I look back now and I see, “Hey, these were issues the whole industry is dealing with you know.”
Chris: Yes.
Theral: As the birth of precision medicine and laboratory medicine and diagnostics, and still diagnostics are not valued I think as highly as they ought to be. And that’s one of the topics we pursue on…
Chris: Relative to therapeutics you mean, for example?
Theral: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Theral: Yeah. So is that a cultural thing? Is that like, you know, I mean you’re a consultant, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Theral: And a lot of companies would just kind of expect you to kind of know what’s wrong and just kind of tell them. They value your working with them to help them solve the problems but they don’t value that initial diagnosis of the problem. And yet we have the cliches like “naming the problem is 50% of the solution kind of thing”.
Chris: Yeah. Now it’s funny you just, it made me think of, you know, where Joe Pulizzi says about content marketing all the time. Everybody wants the solution, no one wants to do the work that’s going to take to figure out what it is. And so half the content marketers don’t have a plan, I mean it’s sort of the same thing, right? Everybody would like a product to solve their disease problem.
Theral: Yeah, yeah. I mean that’s a fascinating…
Chris: The diagnostic is not as sexy for some reason.
Theral: Right, right. So what is the problem there you know? I mean have diagnostics companies in the past just undervalued themselves? Is it just considered a commodity? Maybe it’s something like this. It’s been so commoditized like the typical blood test that we get, looking at our cholesterol or this or that and that has been around for a long time. And now there’s this explosion of new science and new knowledge and research that is really valuable and it’s an explosion literally. And so the market just hasn’t learned yet its value.
Chris: It’s interesting. I’ve never thought of that question about why diagnostics are not as popular. If you’re a business, you can sell the diagnostic once. Although you could sell many of them but you get to sell a drug forever in many cases, right? It’s just a different…
Theral: Right.
Chris: I don’t know if that goes into or not. I’m not that savvy about that.
Theral: I think that’s a lot of why investors invest in the drug company over the diagnostics space.
Chris: They want the long term annuity.
Theral: Yeah. So going back, I do kind of imagine myself sitting there as a marketer trying to figure out this whole genetic testing thing. And if I could have changed anything about myself back then I would have read more and I would have gone to more conferences to realize that the businesses down the road and up the street, to realize that they were going through the same things and connecting with them. And I didn’t do much of that. It was like, “Oh, this is our unique problem.” And we were hitting our heads against the wall trying to figure it out. Now that I’ve interviewed hundreds of people, I mean everybody’s struggling with this and I think they improved, they take steps forward by connecting.
Chris: Yes. I mean that’s another sweet spot topic I’d love to dive into because getting people in our industry to share their challenges. Maybe in biotech it’s different because everybody, maybe they’re working on different things that aren’t competitive. But in life science in general, if you’re a product or a supplier, I find it difficult to get marketers, for example, to share what their challenges are in a group. For some mysterious fear that by saying what they don’t think they’re good at they’re going to give away some intellectual property or secret that some competitor is going to take advantage of.
Theral: Right, right. So the IP is the issue, right? And we want to protect our IP in the companies. I remember when I went to my first trade show way back with the pipette tip company and it was like paradise for me. Because there were all of our competitors with all their latest stuff and you could go just handle it, touch it, talk to the people who sold it, even talk to the people who made it. And we had people in our company who is very much against our exhibiting there but I’m like if we lose any ideas and then we gain so much more and so it’s this balance. And I listen to guests walk this kind of tight rope between protecting IP but sharing what they’re doing in a PR sense.
Chris: Right.
Theral: They need to share enough to get interest, to get the word out there but of course not too much. And usually it’s the CEOs who do that the best and so they’re the ones who come in and talk.
Chris: Exactly, and they’re prepped for that. I’m trying to get people to find that line where they protect their IP. I don’t want anybody to give away their product information but sometimes I feel that we could all elevate the industry and do better for our customers by sharing our marketing challenges with each other and get really good at doing that together and let the products compete but elevate our marketing across the board to serve the health care, the environment community better.
Theral: I think the world of IP is kind of changing actually.
Chris: How so?
Theral: I think we’ve been quite influenced by the IT industry and sector. And they pursued the open source model and there’s whole conferences of open. We’ve had that introduced into science, it’s been most successful with open access journals, right? It’s sort of an ethical imperative for those who have set up these open access journals, which have thrived by the way, PLOS, Public Library of Science. It maybe hasn’t done as well in things like sharing information research but I think you do see some very creative stuff these days with pharma partnering with the universities. Whereas they’re used to be more of a wall there. And I think there’s new tools online for sharing at certain levels. I just interviewed someone from Amazon Cloud and we got a little bit into this. But you can have all of your data uploaded to the Cloud and then you can custom design all of your sharing levels.
Chris: Okay.
Theral: And so I don’t know if this applies to marketers and I know that your audience, it’s more for scientists but maybe marketers can start thinking of the infinite possibilities in between the positions of don’t share anything and share everything.
Chris: Right, exactly. I think there’s an opportunity for that so I appreciate you sharing that. So let’s go back to your podcast a little bit. I’m curious, has it evolved from when you started?
Theral: Yeah.
Chris: Okay, next question.
Theral: For sure. Yes, that’s my answer.
Chris: Moving on… (Chuckle)
Theral: I mean when we started we didn’t have much. I mean I hadn’t really established a name in the industry yet. We were completely the new kid on the block and now it’s much easier for me to get an interview although I have to say in this industry people have been really open to giving interviews and friendly. And particularly on the science side, speaking of IP, investors tend to keep their cards kind of close to their vest.
Chris: That’s sure.
Theral: The less we talk the better we’ll do in business. But we’ve got a few on and there are few enlightened investors who’ve made a brand for themselves by speaking and I think they do well for it, Vinod Khosla for instance. So how else have we evolved? We used to do a show kind of whenever we got one recorded and then we build up our audience to about 50,000 and now we’re sending out a couple of shows a week for the most part.
Chris: You got started before there was a podcasting expert to coach you on every street corner, right? Other than the book you read. I mean now, I have access to a number of different podcasters who are experts and they’ve been doing it and make their living teaching other people how to podcast.
Theral: Uh-huh. You know I was on one last week actually. We’re going to upgrade our recording equipment and studio. So it’s time to do that. I think our audience would be very happy. And so I was on the Podcaster Studio podcast and he goes along and reviews mixers and microphones and all that stuff. That’s he’s whole podcast. It’s just the recording equipment stuff and he’s so good at it. So when you come across a podcast that you need right now, there is nothing in the world like it. Do you know what I mean?
Chris: No, I’m sorry. I missed you there for a second. So when you come across…
Theral: So when you come across a podcast that you need that’s been in the direction that you’ve been researching or interested, and then there’s one show after another and this person is just focused on that niche.
Chris: Yes.
Theral: I mean it makes your month.
Chris: It does, yeah. So I was going to hold this question off but now that you’ve mentioned that, I’m curious what other podcasts you listen to, science or otherwise.
Theral: Yeah. I listen to a lot of radio. I listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson once in a whole.
Chris: Okay.
Theral: I go through different periods. I have a period of six months or a year where I just don’t listen to anything. Usually when I’m in kind of a creative mode and working to produce something new. (I) don’t listen to a lot of science podcasts probably just because I don’t know, I’m reading so much there and doing so much research, going to so many conferences, watching some many talks. I mean get a lot off YouTube, right? If I’m interviewing someone and there’s a video of them on YouTube doing a scientific presentation, my job has just become so much easier because I can see the person, I get a sense of them. I know the trajectory of what they want to talk about. So that helps me and that’s all research stuff. What I do for me sort of honing my podcasting skills, I still watch Charlie Rose. I still like Charlie Rose. I’m changing a bit. I’m less as excited about him as I was when I started. I like something a little more provocative and so I watch every Bill Maher program and watch a lot of Jon Stewart.
Chris: Yep.
Theral: Daily show, yeah. So I love that stuff. And we start to develop a bit. So we started a program, the show called Gene and Tonic.
Chris: Yeah.
Theral: And it was just a short… Did you catch some?
Chris: I have caught some and I want to say when you say that, Gene and Tonic on Mendelspod, I struggle with names, the naming of my business before Live Science Marketing Radio. I’m not even going to mention it because I’m trying to get away from it. But you came up with two of the most brilliant names in our industry, Mendelspod, which if you’re a geneticist goes, “Yeah, I know what he’s talking about.” And Gene and Tonic, I mean it’s great.
Theral: Drink more wine.
Chris: Okay. I’m a Gene and Tonic. I’m going straight for this.
Theral: Drink more gene and tonic.
Chris: Yeah, I’m going straight for those juniper berries.
Theral: I mean it helps to have a friend or a partner, right? I’ve got a partner and I’m on here doing this interview with you. My partner is absolutely equal in this business. I can’t imagine doing it without her.
Chris: And so I have to ask, what does she do?
Theral: So we call her executive producer. She does a lot of the research. So she helps me say, “Yeah. This guest would be good or not.” I mean most of my questions come pretty naturally now because I’m so familiar with the industry. But if we really want to focus on the interview and have a special, I mean okay, they’re all special but maybe if it’s a challenging interview, something new in a new direction then she’ll help me hone the questions. She’s extremely good communicator, that was her field, communication.
Chris: Right.
Theral: And she’s very good at pairing it down to the basics.
Chris: Nice.
Theral: And then she actually has the marketing sense in our team which we always laugh about because I was in marketing, it’s just like, “You’re the marketer. Why didn’t you come up with this?” But she really helped to hone our business model and develop that and then we just do it as a team all the time.
Chris: That’s fantastic. And I ask these questions because I, one, as I mentioned to you privately, I’m encouraging people to think about audio content as a source of content for their business, whether or not they choose to put it out in a regular podcast. And I think it might be a little intimidating so I’m trying to get people understand the level of effort it takes and from my point of view I think it’s easier than most people would expect it to be. Certainly easier than sitting down and writing. And if you’re trying to get content out of a subject matter expert, it’s way easier to put a microphone in front of them and speak to them than to say, “Here’s a blank piece of paper. Tell me everything you know.” Right?
Theral: Yeah.
Chris: Which is just hard for anybody.
Theral: It is, especially scientists who think that it needs to be this and this and this.
Chris: Exactly.
Theral: And that way, right?
Chris: Yeah. And we’re trying to take the constraints off of getting information out of their head.
Theral: Yeah. I was just interviewing a scientist at Baylor a very well known scientist, and we finished the interview and he was obviously very savvy with PR. He turned on the charm and he gave a great interview and then right after he says, “I know what you’re doing.” I said back, “Okay, I’m all ears.” And he says, “The stuff that you’re getting out of scientists today is what’s going to appear on the papers in five years.” And I thought, I haven’t thought of it that way but wow, there’s our whole marketing plan, right?
Chris: I was going to say, yeah, that’s a new marketing plan, right? Yeah, it’s nice to know. We’re telling you know what’s going to happen in five years. So that’s a perfect segue to wrap this up because I have one last question. At the end of the year of course, you know every day now in my inbox, or on LinkedIn, there is some marketer giving their predictions for next year. So now I’m going to ask you what your predictions are for how content and marketing are going to evolve in our industry. What do you see happening? And I’m not asking for next year or whatever, just your general thoughts.
Theral: The trends.
Chris: Yes.
Theral: I mean sometimes I do write what I think is going to happen in the industry for the following years do stay tuned. I’ve even been right once or twice but it’s mostly just for fun.
Chris: None of them say, “Here’s what I said last year.”
Theral: Right.
Chris: Let’s forget about that. Let’s look ahead.
Theral: I did predict that Luke Timmerman would become an entrepreneur. He’s the journalist who used to write at Xconomy and now has his own gig. So trends, yeah. I mean this is a big one. I think there’s trends and I’ll just try to keep it simple but I think there’s total revolutions going on both in the industry, life science industry and in media. In the industry I think it’s more towards the sharing and open access. I really do and that IP is evolving like I was talking about and it’s looked at differently. And there’s a lot of people thinking and a lot of people coming over from tech who are thinking about models that have already become common place in tech where you think about revenue stream later but let’s get the people involved and make this an integral part of life and everything.
Chris: So you would say audience building first, is that how you would… that’s what I’m thinking. I’m not sure that’s what you’re intending.
Theral: With the sharing, yeah exactly. Audience building first and making for sure that there’s connection there and something’s happening. So you don’t have this big, big expensive failures. Now that’s not as easy in the life science industry obviously. This is just a brush stroke. Media is changing as well as we all know, right? I mean you probably don’t get that printed newspaper on your front door every morning like you used to.
Chris: Definitely not. Only when I need to start my barbecue do I go buy a paper, honestly.
Theral: Yeah. And I can just see you there with half of it lit on flame and then you go, “Oh, that’s a good story, trying to put that fire out reading the thing.” So, yeah. I mean media has become much less centralized, so decentralized, right? And we’re all choosing our own channels like we were talking about with podcasting. When you find the right podcast for you, you just feel great. I don’t even subscribe to TV anymore so I’m one of those whose unplugged as they call it. And I just stream everything mostly over the iPad and we just go for the channels that we want and that really appeal for us. The other thing and having to do with marketing, I think marketing and advertising and media is changing. I think when the internet came out we just basically took billboards off the freeway and off the print and stuck them up on the website. But I’ve been following the guy, Lou Paskalis, who says that advertising as an industry is over. Okay, that’s a pretty big claim. But he says, “Now we can all be marketers and get out of that ridiculous business of advertising and here’s what he argues. Advertising is just, you know, it’s so kind of aggressive and just knock you over the head boring.” And he says, “What people want on their devices is not advertisements, it’s content.” And so let’s be marketers and do what’s really fun and that’s create stories and create content.
Chris: Content is the gateway product. If you want to sell somebody something, start with content. Get them hooked on your way of thinking, your experience that you’re delivering to them.
Theral: And marketers, I mean sales people do this when they’re out in the field, right? I read your blog about creating personas and finding ways to talk to people and imagining your customers in this situation. It’s just being willing to do that online digitally. And by the way, I find the blogs very fascinating. I mean I saw you had Dale Yuzuki on your program, he started that Behind the Bench at Thermo. Brilliant, the way they were engaging with their customers.
Chris: Yeah, it is. Well, I got connected with Dale through Jeremy Shoales who is involved in the Thermo blog and a couple of other media projects they’ve done. If you haven’t listen to those episodes, I highly recommend both of them.
Theral: Yeah, I mean Jeremy is an example of somebody that came over from consumer electronics I think.
Chris: Yes.
Theral: And trying to bring some of the tools they figured out there.
Chris: Yeah.
Theral: And I really like life science media is just totally open for new ways. Tech has already matured a bit with their media thing I think. They had Tech Crunch early on and they really evolved but life science was so old fashioned and stayed. I felt as a marketer we had that old GEN, right? Genetic engineering news that came around and a few others and it just wasn’t near as lively as you might get in other sectors.
Chris: Right. And yeah, now every company has the opportunity to make their own channel. Like you say, every consumer is deciding on what their channel will be, so why not take advantage as a company and decide what channel you want to deliver through.
Theral: So you’d like to persuade your audience of marketers, is that it, to consider audio and podcasting?
Chris: I would, I mean among other things. I mean I really just try to help them figure out what content they should create and how they should deliver it. I just think podcasting or creating audio content is overlooked. So I saw something this morning from Jay Baer and I’ve seen this before from him. But if you take it even higher, if you create a video and you have everything you need. You’ve got audio, you’ve got images, you can transcribe the audio into text, you can do everything. And I put a tweet out this morning about the second law of thermodynamics for content which is “You can’t take text and images and audio and somehow squeeze them together and get a video back out of it, right? But if you start with your content by creating video you can turn that into all kinds of things. I’m just trying to make it easier for people to create content rather than starting with written word.
Theral: I think it would be a great trend as it happens, with more marketers considering podcasting. Because it will put them in touch… you know you have to do a podcast therefore you have to research. And you have to think a little bit maybe outside what you were thinking. And we start connecting when we do these podcasts and then you see a bigger picture and I think that’s just always good.
Chris: Yeah, and that’s a huge benefit for the marketers and, as you mentioned, when you build that audience you create access that you might not have had before two individuals who you’d like to have talking to you. And not just people who would talk nicely about your products but you get access to phenomenal scientific minds just to share their thoughts and build your own audience just by sharing what they know, unrelated to anything your product or service does, right? So I think it’s such a human thing to reach out and meet people like we’re doing right here. I mean if I were a marketer at XYZ Company and called you up and said, “Hey, can you do an article for me.” I don’t know what you would have said but I think the chances are lower that someone would say, “Sure, I’ll do that.” Rather than, “Hey, let’s have a conversation about an interesting topic we both think is fun.” Well, Theral Timpson, I want to thank you very much. This has been even better than I imagined and I really enjoyed all the ideas you shared with us today. Is there some place you want people to go and find out more about Mendelspod, I mean I will certainly link to mendelspod.com.
Theral: Cool, thank you. Mendelspod.com, yeah. And thanks for having me on and gave me a chance to talk to your audience. And congratulations on your podcast, you got some really nice shows there.
Chris: Well, thank you very much and it is my pleasure to speak to you today.